Planet Explorers - 20/20 hours

I learned something interesting about the natives of Maria - they once had a technological civilization, but some apocalyptic event (possibly a nuclear war) destroyed their cities and reduced them to unorganized scavengers. That's probably where they got all the rifles and rocket launchers I've seen them use - relics from a past they barely understand.

Unfortunately, I learned literally nothing else about them. It really just came down to a time crunch (despite the fact that I've played this game for more than 21 hours). Later missions were too spread out on the map, so I wasted a lot of time walking. And a lot more time gathering the materials to build a base to let me build an aircraft so I could cover that distance more efficiently.

That's just the way these things go, I suppose. A big reason I love the survival crafting genre is because it allows me to make these elaborate mult-stage plans to overcome inconveniences that most other games have the good sense not to include in the first place.

. . . and it as this point that I started into yet another rendition of my now traditional defense of the genre as a "world in a box." I got about two and a half paragraphs into it before I realized I wasn't saying anything I hadn't said before. That's the danger of doing something like this for four years - patterns emerge and you start to get predictable.

So how does Planet Explorers break the pattern? What is its niche in the genre? Pretty much every game of this type exists because someone wanted to change something about Minecraft. From there, you have to trace differences like branches of a tree. Planet Explorers is on the branch that wanted more realistic graphics. And of those, it further branches into science fiction. But it stays on a single planet instead of going out into space.

So far, that could describe about a half-dozen games, I'm sure. Planet Explorers has the advantage of not looking too nice, which may not seem like much of a benefit, but resulted in it running without any sort of problems on my laptop. The story mode was decent. I'm interested in learning more about this planet and its people, though I'm not sure story modes are all that rare. Its Creator Tool is very powerful, allowing you to make equipment, vehicles, and cosmetic items to a ridiculous degree of specificity . . . but I had neither the patience nor the skill to use it (or, more accurately, I didn't have patience with my lack of skill - seriously, my attempt at a fuselage looked like a tiny gnome had a furious, but largely impotent grudge with a soda can.)

Overall, I'd say it's a middle-ground sort of game. It could tide me over until I get a computer capable of running No Man's Sky at a decent framerate. Or I could play it when I start to find Starbound's 2D to be too limiting. Or I could retreat to it when Space Engineers proves too fiddly and demanding. In fact, it could prove to be a decent second choice to just about any survival game in my repertoire. But it will likely never be my first choice.

At least, never except the one time I decide to play it all the way through to see the end of the story. I really do want to know what's going on with those aliens. . .

Just not today. I've got time to squeeze in one more game before the end of the blog, and I want to go out on a high note. Sadly, Planet Explorers is a good second choice for that purpose as well.